Laura Mullen

Laura Mullen is the author of eight books: Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Award. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and has been a frequent visitor to the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work is included in American Hybrid and Postmodern American Poetry (Norton) as well as other anthologies; recent poems have appeared in The Nation and Poetry. An essay on using Gertrude Stein in the creative writing classroom is included in the forthcoming anthology Approaches to Teaching Stein. Her collaboration with the composer Nathan Davis (a work for choir and percussion), “Ask,” will be performed at Princeton in December 2016.

Artifice and interface

We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.

Postscript // Bibliography // Acknowledgments

T.1 The poem is ontologically dissevering: necessarily fragmenting and framentary.

T.2 Holding concretized, ready-made “significance” and in abeyance, the poem functions as a catch, an apparatus used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s).

T.3 So as to render inoperative those ossified subject-configurations most exploitable by market vampirism, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (where flesh meets fluorescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

In order to celebrate the conclusion of “Prolegomena to (Any Future) Process Poetics,” I’d like to provide a postscript that distills the central concerns of these twelve dense riffs into a series of pointed propositions. The following twenty theses comprise the core of this thinking and will act (I hope) as a lens for future rereading. Thank you, dear readers, for engaging with/in this work.